Admittedly, hearing about children massacred in their schoolhouse brought me to tears.

As high powered gunfire and screams pierced through the school loudspeaker which someone wisely left on, one little boy told his teacher, "Don't worry, I know karate." This little innocent thought his martial art skills could somehow make the murderer stop. His teacher directed the children where to run, to run literally for their lives to a nearby fire station. The murders in Newtown, Conn., show us what we've become. We, as a society, have made this possible.

Whatever the causes, one thing we must do, is become more than this.

America has become a place where mass murder is all too common. All too seldom do we attempt to determine if our protections for our young people are enough. We secretly sit and think, Newtown is not our town. And slowly, even this too will fade into the background. We've come to think as long as it isn't us, isn't me, we are all right. Then comes the next horror.

It was in the early 1980's that I attended a class taught by one of the FBI's creators or the unit now known popularly as profilers. He learned that use of a psychiatric evaluation of serial killers reaped great rewards for preventing future killings. Yet even then, all those thirty years ago, at the end of our course he speculated that the "crime of the future" would be mass shootings. We were left to reflect on that.

Our laws are strange. We rightly prohibit execution of the insane. The ancient "humanity of English law" prohibits execution for those who, if in their right mind, might offer a defense that would otherwise stay their execution. I believe we should ensure we don't arrive at this juncture. I would suggest that we act beforehand, to prevent our arrival at the controversy of whether to execute a man who might be mad.

What we need to do is return to first principles.

If evidence suggests a person needs mental health treatment, then he should be sent for help. Interesting we use the word, "help." No parent, no community can afford not to evaluate those whose psychiatric condition could lead to violence. We are thus quite literally helping them, because they cannot help themselves. Isn't that what friends do for those needing help in their community?

Further, why continue to pretend that those already evaluated as mentally disabled be allowed to "choose" whether they take their medications? What if the mass murderers we all wring our hands about simply didn't take medication which would have prevented their actions? Is the abstract love of "privacy" so sacrosanct that we fantasize, or better said, wish, that a person incapable of rational thought be given the "right" to choose? What if his demons tell him to "choose" to shoot down little boys and girls in kindergarten?

So, what to do?

First, engage mental health professionals in this process. If our goal is to stop mass murderers -- and we believe that at least some of them are planned, then meticulously executed -- we need to evaluate how this came about. Most would agree that shooting little children in their schools, shooting theater goers, and shooting mall shoppers is not normal. If family members, community representatives, supervisors, or others refer a person for mental health evaluation, then why not a mental health check up, with no repercussions, if negative? As a preventive measure, would this not be of value?

What if medication is recommended? Laws which mandate taking such medication would be of great assistance, if only as a preventive measure. But what if treatment is recommended? What if hospitalization? This is the problematic area. A false economic move, defended by specious arguments of privacy and choice, defended closing mental institutions. When we realize that the tremendous success of the FBI's ability to profile serial killers came from interviews of those believed beyond the pale of human value, we need to rethink mental institutions.

A revitalized mental institutional system could be a boon to our society. We would have a vast laboratory of research, the better to understand the human brain, and how to make people well. There, instead of creating vast holding pens for those we don't understand, we could learn how to evaluate, to learn and so to heal.

We owe this to ourselves. We owe trying to stop the next mass murderer to those who visit malls, who go to movies, and to our little children, whose only hope becomes whether they "know karate."

John Davis is a recently retired federal employee who served as a counterintelligence investigator, first with the Army, then with civil service. He lives in Athens, Ala. Email: thingsth@bellsouth.net.